Sunday, 18 October 2015

Charles Brasch and Dante

Unexpectedly,
as he draws to the end of the steadfast and beautiful autobiography of the
first half of his life (‘Indirections: a Memoir 1909-1947’, pages 412-413), the
New Zealander Charles Brasch introduces from out of his reading time, Dante
Alighieri. The timeframe is the immediate end of the second war, as he calls
it, and Brasch is returning from wartime life in Britain to his homeland.

Reading
just then the early cantos of the ‘Inferno’, suddenly for the first time I felt
I understood what inspired the ‘Commedia’ and what it is all about. It is a
vision of the terrible reality of good and evil, and of the inescapable
consequences of human action, which is the exercise of free will. The vision
begins significantly in that dark wood between youth and middle age, where
Dante implies that he had lost all sense of purpose and of right and wrong and
that the life he was living was an unworthy one – unworthy of him. All at once
he saw what he was in danger of becoming, and by contrast what he could become
if he willed. The vision was a warning to him: unless he mended his life he
would end up as one of the damned, bound for ever in the torment of a spiritual
state, the inward being of those physical states the ‘Inferno’ shows; for right
and wrong, good and evil, his own sin and the truth and beauty which he had
first seen or imagined in Beatrice were real, overwhelmingly real. To make the
torment worse, he would be self-condemned, for it was in his power to live ill
or well, as he chose.

Dante’s
account of states of the soul which may be said to be true for all men in all
ages is given in terms of the theology and cosmology of his own age; but what
he is essentially concerned to say is plain enough, and simple enough: men are,
spiritually, what they wish to be; they judge themselves by what they think and
say and do, and judgement is now and all the time, for they are all the time
faced by choices between right and wrong, or better and worse. Purgation there
may be, if sin has not bitten too deep, but annulment never: what is done is
done for all time. So, for those who are damned, “Nulla speranza li conforta
mai”; for the good there is the “Oh sanza brama sicura richezza!” of Paradise.
To speak of Dante’s cruelty is thus to miss the point. He does not condemn men
to the punishments of the ‘Inferno’, on the contrary he is urgently warning
them by showing the degradation and torment they condemn themselves to by evil
living, by not caring, by indifference.

Here
is Brasch at the midpoint of his own life journey pondering the midlife change
brought by Dante into the light of day. Brasch’s ‘Indirections’ (the title
comes from Hamlet’s line, “By indirections find directions out”) is a sustained
memory of Dunedin childhood, youth and early adulthood, in which he honours the
many people who brought him to a place where he could learn his own direction
in life, in his case to be a writer and founder of the pre-eminent New Zealand
journal Landfall. The first to advise that he is not Dante, Brasch all the same
repeats the Dantesque process of composing a work that, by describing the lives
of those he remembers in his own life, both living and in books, comes to a
point where he can now explain, in all senses of the word relief, his
understanding of life, and even something of that mystery, Charles Brasch
himself.

It
is refreshing to read Brasch’s experience of Dante as a sustained exercise in
retrospection. Those who read anything as though it were happening in real time
now, and many Dante readers judge him on this count, have yet to develop the
sense, essential in reading, that the ‘Commedia’, as with most writing, is
retrospection. This is especially true of such a distillation of life’s
experience as we find in Dante. The drama is forward moving, happens in the
present tense, and is about people who are no longer among the living. Which
only causes us to marvel at Dante’s preparation for his poem, meditating at
depth on the views he has of all of those in the ‘Commedia’, whether fictional
or from his own lifetime, or history. Yet Brasch also grasps the essential
drama of moral choice that we all encounter at times in our life, usually after
rather than before we understand how choice arises.

To
see the ‘Commedia’ as a warning is pivotal for a reader: the poem is spoken to
the individual listener, you or I. It may be a drama involving ancient great
poets, but each episode, each canto, confronts us with the deadly sins that we
have every freedom to indulge in ourselves. It is not as though we don’t have
the choice, and this is Dante’s point, we know what he’s talking about, almost
certainly. This could happen to us, and that goes for all three places
described in the poem.

Brasch
is to be recommended for his observation that the essential meaning of the
‘Commedia’ is in the lives lived, not the cosmological structures (strange as
they would have seemed even in the fourteenth century) or the, for us,
curiously rigid hierarchy of the afterlife, reflective of feudal society. That
we may be judged at every moment of our lives seems a restrictive existence
until we appreciate that Brasch is saying what Dante is dramatising, we live in
the here and now alive to what we have done and have not done. There are
readers of Dante who would resist the permanence of the states his people find
themselves in, whether infernal, purgatorial, or paradisal, who find this an
unreal completion of their lives. In the fixity of the storyline this may be
so, but then it is just that, a story, made to confront us with our own life of
choices. It is a useful exercise to test which episodes we, as private readers,
are drawn to, those from which we recoil, and those that leave us indifferent.
We will find, as we do when reading books of personal development, that
conditions we identify with are intrinsic to our own personality and dilemmas.

“By
indirections find directions out” is shorthand for the state the character
Dante finds himself in at the opening of ‘Inferno’. It raises the question of
when is the right age to read Dante as, for some readers at least, the poem is
one of experience, of the condition of looking both backward and forward in
time, unable to make very much sense of either. While this is a helpful check,
a reminder that it is a poem set in mid-life, indeed erupting out of that
state, it is helpful to remember Dante’s own message in the poem, that
judgement is in the here and now. If that is so, then mature reading age is as
good a place to start as any. Anyone in late teens or their twenties will
encounter in some of these cantos glimpses of life as a reality of desires and
choices. Even to do nothing is a choice and there is a special place in
‘Inferno’ reserved for them as well.